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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29298108">That's how the light gets in</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silex/pseuds/Silex'>Silex</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Original Work</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Animals, Gen, Magical Realism</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 07:01:16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,811</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29298108</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silex/pseuds/Silex</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Ring the bells that still can ring<br/>Forget your perfect offering<br/>There is a crack, a crack in everything<br/>That's how the light gets in</i>
</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Herd of miniature flying horses &amp; world-weary tough person</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>15</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Chocolate Box - Round 6</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>That's how the light gets in</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/Edonohana/gifts">Edonohana</a>.</li>



    </ul></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It had been a surprise when the old house came into his possession. A decrepit old place left by the passing of an aunt that no one in the family had particularly cared for. The place hadn’t been left to him, in fact her will had been frustratingly vague about what was left to who, leaving the family to decide what to do. Because he had the time it had become his responsibility to fix it.</p>
<p>A falling apart house left to no one in will that was more confusing than meaningful. It was an apt summary of his life at the time.</p>
<p>When he’d been young, truly young, he’d thought a career in the military would be a good fit for him, and it had been. Or at least it had been better than anything else. If nothing else it kept his life focused until bad luck and an accident of the kind that wasn’t anyone’s fault brought an early end to all that.</p>
<p>Forced into medical retirement, left with a limp as a souvenir, and no real sense of what he wanted to do with himself, he found what work he could, odd jobs here and there, eventually working as a handyman. During that time he’d met a woman, dated on and off for a year and somewhere along the line ended up deciding to get married.</p>
<p>Marriage, unfortunately, proved far harder than being friends and after a great deal of trying on both their parts, they realized that it had been a mistake.</p>
<p>The real problem was the only thing they had in common was that both of them had been at a point where they didn’t know what they wanted in life. She’d said she wanted to get back to college so she could be a school teacher and to have a house with a yard and a white picket fence, a cat and a dog and two kids to play in that yard, but what she really wanted was some nebulous <em>more</em> that she couldn’t articulate.</p>
<p>They’d talked and agreed it was best and she’d left and they’d moved on separately. They remained cordial afterwards, not exactly friends, but occasionally writing to each other, or making phone calls when it felt especially necessary.</p>
<p>She’d gone off to find whatever it was that she was looking for and he’d gotten a decrepit house with a weed choked yard and a falling down picket fence. There were no kids or dogs, but there was a family of possums in the eaves and an ornery raccoon that lived under the porch, occasionally sticking his head up through the hole where the boards had rotted through in one corner.</p>
<p>James had planned on fixing it up, getting his head on straight and getting things in order so it could be sold.</p>
<p>Because he was tired of renting from landlords who couldn’t be bothered and apartment buildings full of strangers, he decided to live in the house. No one wanted the place, so no one complained.</p>
<p>That meant the first place in it that was livable was the back bedroom on the second floor, right under where the possums lived.</p>
<p>They made an awful racket some nights when he got home from work, but they’d been there first and they made the house less empty.</p>
<p>The next room that got fixed up was what probably was supposed to be a master bedroom judging by the empty metal bedframe, a mess of rust and dry rotted wood, and the assorted clutter that came with a lived in room that got lived in more than it got cleaned.</p>
<p>Old clutter that made him feel oddly voyeuristic to sort through, even though the woman it had belonged to was long gone.</p>
<p>He cleaned that room to make it into an office because he needed a place to relax and set up some bookshelves that he could eventually fill with battered old Louis L'Amour paperbacks, just to have something other than tearing up old carpeting and tearing down old drywall to occupy his mind.</p>
<p>Catching up on his reading got him into a contemplative state of mind and he started keeping a journal, because some of the things he found working on the house were interesting, albeit probably only to him.</p>
<p>Pulling away broken kitchen cabinets and finding writing on the wall behind them, penciled in lines and measurements that didn’t match the ones he was tearing down, showing that someone else had done the same before him.</p>
<p>It was an interesting little mystery to him, and gave the house a sense of history that it was badly missing. He’d never known the aunt who owned it, though some of the neighbors had made comments that she’d been eccentric in ways that it was hard to put a finger on.</p>
<p>Something about the house, they’d said.</p>
<p>He could believe it, because the house and all the junk he found cleaning the closets and attic did feel like the kind of things that would belong to someone who wasn’t quite there.</p>
<p>Not crazy exactly, just that they focused on different things than everybody else. Like stashing away a full collection of china where no two of the pieces came from the same set and storing neatly away in the bottom of the linen closet.</p>
<p>Interspersed with day-to-day thoughts on work and fixing the house were his thoughts on the raccoon, who he’d ended up naming Jocko.</p>
<p>By that point the raccoon seemed to have gotten used to having a human in his house and would walk right up James, waiting for his nightly dog biscuit. Bold, but quiet, he was s sharp contrast to the possums, who remained hidden and made more noise than his neighbors in the last apartment he’d lived in.</p>
<p>In between catching up on his reading and writing down his thoughts on fixing the house, he moved from the inside of the house to the out as spring flowed seamlessly into summer.</p>
<p>He took one or two classes over the summer of course, but there was more time to work on the house, moving from the inside to the out.</p>
<p>Shingles and siding were replaced with the help of some friends he’d made, the payment money as much as favors and drinks at the bar come Friday night.</p>
<p>He got a job working construction with one of them. Though he wasn’t the fastest worker, he was steady and reliable.</p>
<p>It also gave him more help with the house and by midsummer he was ready to start on the backyard.</p>
<p>He’d kept it and the front yard mowed and clear of the worst weeds prior to that point, but there was a lot to be done.</p>
<p>Fighting back flowerbeds that had gone wild, trimming what might have been hedges at one point that had decided to become trees, and figuring out what to do about the old oak tree with its creeping roots that made mowing around it a hazard.</p>
<p>He’d thought it was dead, twisted as it was, with sloughing bark and drooping branches, but in the spring it had managed to put out a few leaves.</p>
<p>It was, he decided, Frankenstein’s monster as far as trees went, a dead thing galvanized to life by electricity, because it had been hit by lightning more than once in the past judging by the jagged lines of stripped bark running down it, and during the first big storm of the summer it was struck again.</p>
<p>And again in each storm that followed, putting out new leaves when the old were singed away.</p>
<p>James had planned to borrow a chainsaw from a friend once he found someone who’d help split the wood from it and haul it off, but that plan fell through after he nearly broke his foot tripping over a hunk of concrete in the backyard.</p>
<p>His toes turned black and blue and his foot swelled up enough that it was a struggle to put on his work boot. He vowed that as soon as he was able he’d dig the thing up and get rid of it.</p>
<p>Which he did, waiting until after rain made the ground soft enough to dig whatever it was up easily.</p>
<p>The thing turned out to be a birdbath, bowl and pedestal fallen over and sunken into the dirt, but otherwise intact.</p>
<p>Instead of tossing it into the woods behind the house, he ended up fixing the thing and much like the horseshoe nail starting a cascade of failure in a poem he remembered from back in high school, it spared the life of the oak tree and changed everything.</p>
<p>Once righted the birdbath held water and provided no end of entertainment.</p>
<p>Even the most dignified of birds would hop up into it and puff into a perfectly round ball, rolling and splashing.</p>
<p>And it wasn’t only birds drawn to it.</p>
<p>One hot evening he watched as Jocko the raccoon walked across the backyard and lay down in it for a good soak before wandering off into the night to do whatever it was raccoons did when they weren’t waiting for dog biscuits.</p>
<p>In the early morning he caught glimpses of enormous white moths, fluttering around it, never landing, and scattering if he got too close, seeking refuge in the crevices in the bark of the old oak tree.</p>
<p>He left the tree for those moths because he’d never seen anything like them and wanted to at least get a closer look at them before getting rid of it.</p>
<p>Except, they weren’t moths, at least he didn’t think so, but they weren’t birds either.</p>
<p>Books from the library about how to attract butterflies to the garden gave him guidance for drawing them out of hiding. Slices of fruit left out only drew the attention of bright orange oriels and darting hummingbirds while the moths remained elusive.</p>
<p>He tried luring them in at night with a flashlight aimed as a white sheet, and while it brought out mottled hawkmoths with shocking eyespots on their wings and a pale green luna moth, the strange white moths never appeared.</p>
<p>The way they came out in the early morning and retreated to the shade of the still half-wild garden later in the day had been what had first made him think that they weren’t moths, but he couldn’t figure out what else they might have been.</p>
<p>He kept trying to get a better look, but they stayed out, bright flashes in the dappled shade beneath the leaves.</p>
<p>They stayed out all day, retreating when he entered the yard to do work, but eventually reappearing.</p>
<p>Whatever they were, they were shy, vanishing at the passing of a shadow overhead or anything rustling through the leaves.</p>
<p>In the morning, as he drank his coffee he watched them, learning their favorite hiding places and making a mental note of it.</p>
<p>In the evening as the sunset, they would retreat back to the oak tree and hide there in the many holes dotting its trunk.</p>
<p>If nothing else watching them gave him something different to write about in his journal.</p>
<p>The oak tree, he decided would stay, annoying as it was to mow the grass around it.</p>
<p>Oddly enough, it was the act of mowing the grass near a very different tree that finally rewarded him with a closer look at the creatures.</p>
<p>Everything in the yard fled when he mowed the lawn, the squirrels in the trees, the birds, and of course the moths.</p>
<p>This time, as he went by the corner of the yard, shaded by a maple tree leaning over the fence, where the ferns grew, careful to give them a wide berth as they marked the location of a mysterious pile of bricks and rubble, that, according to a neighbor had once been an outdoor oven of some kind, he noticed the ferns shaking violently.</p>
<p>Whatever was there didn’t flee, which piqued his curiosity.</p>
<p>The shaking continued when he killed the mower, something about it making him uncomfortable. Whatever was in there was either hurt or dangerous, possibly both.</p>
<p>He’d long known that there were snakes in the yard, he’d seen the holes in the ground along the fence, even if he’d never seen them, which was why he left the mower where it was and went to the garage to get the machete.</p>
<p>He’d never purchased it, the rusted piece of metal being one of the few useable tools he’d found in the garage, and he’d kept if for yardwork. It had proven suitable for dealing with the inexplicable brambles that had grown up one side of the house and would work fine for clearing away some ferns and dealing with a snake.</p>
<p>He almost felt guilty as he swung the blade through the soft green fronds, but whatever danger they hid couldn’t be left to its own devices.</p>
<p>Sure enough there was a snake there, longer than he could easily see and as thick around as his arm.</p>
<p>Yellow eyes set deep in its head stared at him when it rolled into view amid the things coils and it looked at him.</p>
<p>He’d seen eyes like that before, once and then again in half remembered dreams.</p>
<p>They’d been watching him from uncomfortably close and then gone.</p>
<p>He’d been the only one to see them, but that didn’t matter in the end because he recognized the danger and warned everyone else.</p>
<p>The snake opened its mouth and hissed, the scales around its neck raising like the fur of an angry cat.</p>
<p>Something shining white moved amid its coils and, even as it lifted its head, scales along its neck spreading wider and wider like it was a cobra, he struck.</p>
<p>He was fast, but it was faster, fangs clattering against the blade, holding it back.</p>
<p>The snake, and at that moment he still believed it was a snake because there was nothing else it could have been, was strong, stronger than him, and a loop of its coils loosened, coming up to twist around his hand.</p>
<p>Those black scales were sharp, drawing blood, but he knew if he loosened his grip on the machete the snake would wrench it from his grasp and then he’d be without a weapon.</p>
<p>Its yellow eyes narrowed, the snake seeming to realize it was equally stuck.</p>
<p>Another loop of its body shifted, giving James his first good impression of exactly how long the creature was, something that belonged in a jungle, not in some rural backyard.</p>
<p>Planting his feet, he pulled and the snake fought back, trying to pull him into its coils.</p>
<p>The one advantage he had was that it was already holding onto something and whatever that something was, it didn’t want to let go.</p>
<p>Scales bit deeper into his hand as he pulled back, feeling the muscles of his shoulder start to protest.</p>
<p>He managed half a step back before the snake looped more of itself around his arm, the weight of it nearly pulling him to the ground.</p>
<p>It hissed around the blade, the noise vibrating through the metal, deep into the bones of his fingers.</p>
<p>Another half step backwards was all he could manage, the weight of the thing too much.</p>
<p>It was all he needed.</p>
<p>The snake flinched as one of its coils was pulled from shade into open sun, loosening its grip on the machete to rear back and strike him.</p>
<p>Only this time it hesitated, slowing from faster than the eye could follow to merely being a dark blur.</p>
<p>Slower, but not enough for him to think, only for him to act.</p>
<p>This time when he swung the machete it struck true and the snake’s head fell from its body.</p>
<p>Not willing to accept it was dead, fangs continued to snap, even as scales dulled to gray and then white, blowing away like ash in the wind.</p>
<p>The coils of its body shuddered and fell still, remaining tightly knotted around whatever it was holding.</p>
<p>Curiosity got the better of him and he pulled its body out into the open.</p>
<p>It was long, more than ten feet by his best guess, but the body withered and crumpled too fast in the sun for him to know exactly how big it was.</p>
<p>All he could be certain of was that he’d been wrong to think it was a snake. Snakes didn’t have dozens of spiky little legs starting halfway down their body, nor did they have forked tails ending in curving, barbed bone.</p>
<p>And snakes definitely didn’t crumble to ash in the sunlight.</p>
<p>Amazingly, the thing that it had been attacking was still alive, one of the moths, only just as the thing he’d killed wasn’t a snake, the creature he’d saved wasn’t a moth.</p>
<p>It stood on four slender legs, four ragged, powdery wings fluttering uncertainly on its back. Crouching down he was able to see that it possessed the perfectly formed body of a horse.</p>
<p>Or almost perfectly, it had a bobtail like a rabbit, which he’d eventually come to name the creature for.</p>
<p>Bob didn’t fly away or flee into the ferns, it stood there on shaky legs, dazed.</p>
<p>Figuring that it was in shock and not sure what else to do he picked it up and brought it into the house.</p>
<p>He found an old shoe box that he’d been saving for something and made a kind of nest for it from a dishrag. Next to the nest he put a bottle cap of water.</p>
<p>The creature drank greedily, enough that he needed to refill the cap twice, before falling into a deep sleep.</p>
<p>James left the box on the porch, expecting that the creature would fly away when it recovered, not sure what else to do with it.</p>
<p>It was still there in the evening when he went to check on it so he brought it to the back yard where the creatures gathered and turned the box on its side.</p>
<p>The still unnamed Bob walked out, uncertain.</p>
<p>Several of the others landed near it and walked alongside it before taking to the air.</p>
<p>Bob eventually followed, flying a few wobbly circles with them before landing.</p>
<p>As it grew darker James watched the pale shapes in the air and on the ground, until they retreated back to the tree, the one of them he’d rescued finding a hiding place amid the roots.</p>
<p>After that, whenever he was in the backyard he kept an eye out for them.</p>
<p>The one he’d saved always stuck low to the ground, walking as much as flying and slower to flee from him than the others.</p>
<p>It would retreat, but not hide, watching him as he went about whatever he was doing.</p>
<p>In time he named the creature Bob, and as James got feel for the patterns of their movement, some of the others were named as well.</p>
<p>After the snake he paid more attention to the creatures and everything else in the yard, especially around the oak tree.</p>
<p>Sometimes, even long after storms had passed, the air around the tree felt electric.</p>
<p>The creatures were most active then, Bob rising up into the air to join them, never flying as high or as fast, but managing well enough.</p>
<p>Even on the ground Bob wasn’t alone often, one or another of the creatures joining it.</p>
<p>They all remained skittish, even Bob, retreating when he was in the yard, though sometimes, if he was out for long enough, Bob would emerge and follow along behind him, watching as long as he didn’t turn around too quickly to look.</p>
<p>In time he discovered that he’d made a mistake in naming Bob, but by then it was too late.</p>
<p>Because one day, Bob wasn’t alone in following him.</p>
<p>An even smaller one of the creatures walked at Bob’s side and this one, like all young creatures was curious.</p>
<p>Bob Jr. walked right up to him, sniffing at the toe of his shoe before jumping back, much to Bob’s displeasure.</p>
<p>In time Bob Jr. grew even more bold, and once it learned to fly, which took several years, it would come up to take a grain of sugar from the tip of his finger, eventually learning to land on James’ open hand.</p>
<p>While there was never another snake James occasionally found things while working in the yard that made him wonder.</p>
<p>Beneath the old patio stones, when he got tired of how uneven they were, he found a few broken bits of bone. He would have thought them to be from a cat, except they were blue green, cold and clear as glass.</p>
<p>Despite how long he held them in the palm of his hand, examining them, they never grew warm, and in the end he reburied them under the first brick he put down for the new patio.</p>
<p>Once a falcon with steely feathers and red eyes landed at the birdbath, frightening away all other creatures from the yard. It looked him right in the eye and before it flew off to sit in the oak tree, he noticed a saddle on its back and reins trailing from its beak.</p>
<p>Another time he came home late one night and saw a dark creature waiting on his front porch, not a raccoon like Jocko, but something else.</p>
<p>Something with long ears and patches of deeper darkness in its face where its eyes should have been.</p>
<p>James opened the gate and went around to the backdoor that night.</p>
<p>Bob and Bob Jr. had been waiting there for him, pacing nervously.</p>
<p>Once they saw him they darted off to hide amid the roots of the oak tree, satisfied that he was safe.</p>
<p>Because like all things in life, he understood that there were two sides to the magic he had stumbled across, beautiful things like the moth-winged horses and the strange falcon, but also things like the snake and the long-eared shadow.</p>
<p>He had stumbled across something that needed to be kept safe, but also something that had the potential to be dangerous and by chance alone he had found himself responsible for that.</p>
<p>The really odd thing was that other people seemed able to sense there was something about the property, something different and not quite normal. Because he’d said he would, he did make a token effort at getting the place sold, but everyone who came to look found a reason not to buy the place. In the end the house ended up his and he was glad for it.</p>
<p>It was a strange responsibility that he had, but one he was willing to take up, for it was a wonderful thing to have found a place in the world where a begging raccoon would be waiting on the porch at night and a herd of flying horses hid in the garden.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Title and summary from Leonard Cohen's 'Anthem'.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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